Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Zulu tone logic/reply (3)

Mostly from Doke's Zulu-English dictionary. It only gives the surface tones, and gives them as numbers on a scale from 1 to 9. It's not straightforward how to interpret these numbers initially, you need to have known high-low patterns to compare with the numbers. For example, what Doke gives as 2.4.3.9 is actually a HLHL pattern; the 4 is not particularly low but because it's lower than the surrounding tones, it's a low tone. The article Zulu grammar gives a good overview of the tone rules, but it's not at all straightforward to derive the original underlying tone from the surface tone. In fact, sometimes it's simply ambiguous as multiple different underlying tone patterns can result in the same surface tone.